The 65 minutes long work is a poetic essay and a double love story. there is the filmmaker's love for San Francisco, a city where all one's special and beloved places "are disappearing before your eyes," and there is her love for women -- women who are almost too beautiful to be looked at, who are adored, courted, pursued, but remain elusive.

Under the expert curatorial guidance of Ed Budz, the Thalia theater at Symphony Space is offering a remarkable cinematic series this summer. Appropriately if prosaically titled Classics in HD, it includes some of the most memorable films in 20th century film history.

PBS offered a new film take on the book, not a remake of Hitchcock. I'm glad they did. For all its faults, the PBS version of The Lady Vanishes captures much more of the spirit of the novel it's based on.

Why, for example, would Hitchcock offer Tippi the coveted part of Marnie on June 7, 1962, during filming of the sand dune scene, only to deliberately attempt to physically harm her (as depicted in the drama) by smashing the glass telephone booth, which was filmed on June 12 -- only a few days later?

Hitchcock is two things that I despise: It pointlessly rewrites history to give us conformist, pandering character arcs for the sake of 'playing to the masses' and it also takes what should be an adult film and plays it to the level of young children.

This week, depending on where you live, you could spend time with a sadistic murderer with a penchant for elaborate death traps in The Collection, or with a sadistic murderer with a penchant for weeding out who's been naughty and who's been nice in the Xmas-themed Silent Night.

Repulsion, which is currently being revived at Film Forum, is an essay in at least two forms of subjectivity: that of the omniscient viewer of Carol, the disturbed woman played with such enigmatic brilliance by the youthful Catherine Deneuve, and of Carol herself.